What is an emotion
For us to be able to comprehend and manage a strong and complicated emotion like anger, first of all, it is significant that we understand the meaning of emotions, what is their point, and their function in our life. An emotion is an almost automatized experience that we feel from the first moments of our existence and a combination of them gives meaning to our life. Feelings accompany our thoughts, perceptions, actions, and experiences. They are an internal guide, a good friend that motivates us to act by giving us energy and rhythm.
Feelings can be experienced with a high intensity or they could be milder. Sometimes we could maybe identify and understand them and sometimes not. We could assess them as unpleasant or pleasant, negative or positive, welcome them or have an emotional reaction that is unsuitable or unacceptable. Nonetheless, we are conversing with them and they hold the answer to our internal or external environment and to everything that happens in our life at the moment we experience it. It is highly important to have the capability to understand our emotional reactions and while giving them meaning we should wonder why a certain feeling emerges and what it wants to tell us. What does it remind us of and what does it motivate us to do?
“Very often I feel like I can’t control my emotions and that they overwhelm me. Unfortunately, that is a remark that everyone around me often makes; that I am very intense and I react way too emotionally, but I don’t know what to do with my emotions at that moment.”
Chr. University student, DUTH., 19 years old
Anger as an emotion
Anger for the majority of people is evaluated as a negative and unpleasant feeling that causes great discomfort and usually, the subject wants to repel it promptly. For others, even though it is unpleasant, it seems like a just and proper reaction to what they have to deal with at that particular moment.
Anger, like every emotion, causes changes in our systems and physical reactions, like increased heart rate, temperature rise, blushing, breathing and voice changes, crying, and alterations in our extraverbal behavior. That includes facial expressions or our bodily posture and movement. The emotion of anger often makes us feel like we’re physically and mentally getting ready to give a “fight”. It comes to us as a natural reaction when we perceive a situation as negative, unpleasant, or threatening and our system tries to respond and react to it.
Occasionally anger seems to be related to some people’s behavior. They usually act invasively on a person’s life. The emotion of anger is accompanied by some particular behavioral types to be fully understandable by others that they’re overstepping some boundaries and they’re probably going to face the consequences of their actions.
Like every other emotion, anger too is experienced by the entire human population. Common ground for the entirety of emotions is their right management in a way that doesn’t overstep other people’s and the subject’s boundaries.
“What mostly concerns me is my nerves, I have noticed that I fidget and act abruptly at the slightest thing. Nowadays though I think that the situation has gone too far, I reached the point to attack a friend of mine… at that moment the only thing I was feeling was the anger inside me boiling and I lashed out. Even though I was right because someone had to react to the stupid things he was doing, I don’t want to be like that whenever someone gets on my nerves, I’m afraid that it’s going to affect my relationships.”
G. University student, DUTH., 20 years old
Anger management
Managing means in a way the performance of some continuous actions for a problem to be dealt with. This applies to emotions too, when expressing them behaviorally could be considered a problem. How can we manage our anger then?
A short story including a balloon could teach us a great deal about how anger works, or the way we could function when angry.
There was once a little child that was inflating balloons so much that they were becoming enormous. Just when he was tying them tightly, he carried them with him and he used to pop them with a tiny little pin sometimes in front of people which had made him angry, and other times in front of strangers. What he managed was to scare off these people so much that every single person had a completely different reaction; one could cry, another could hide and some others could run to hide or even attack him. When another child asked him how he was feeling after all these reactions he answered that the anger doesn’t evaporate, on the contrary, it grows even more, but he doesn’t know what else to do. Then the other child suggested that he shouldn’t inflate the balloons to pop them. Instead, he should inflate them just as much for his anger to be fulfilled, and not tie them up, but let the air leave them gradually and tie them up again.
From this short story, it’s easy to understand that if we express our anger in a controlled way and if we give ourselves the right amount of time and space to everything that angers us and fully understand them, then this technique could give other people the chance to understand what it is that filled us with anger. This way, we allow ourselves to observe the emotion of anger, express it through words, and listen to what other people have to say. We could make good use of our self-regulation and self-control skills and take the time we need to think about what we want to say and do, without hurting the people around us.